Sister Rose Thering, a Roman Catholic nun and former professor at Seton Hall University who battled anti-Semitism within her church and contributed to a historic Vatican declaration that Jews were not collectively responsible for the death of Jesus, died May 6 at a convent in Racine, Wis. She was 85.

The cause was kidney failure, said Catherine Memory, a university spokeswoman. She said Dr. Thering died at the Siena Center of the Sisters of St. Dominic, where she entered religious life in 1936 and had lived since retiring last year as professor emerita of education at Seton Hall, in South Orange, N.J.

Dr. Thering – who wore a Star of David fused to the cross on her neck, used words such as “chutzpah” and closed her letters with “shalom” – devoted most of her adult life to writing, lecturing and traveling the world in a quest to promote greater understanding in the often-strained relationships between Christians and Jews.

As a member of a commission appointed by Gov. Thomas Kean, she helped write a 1994 law mandating the teaching of the Holocaust and genocide in all elementary and high schools in New Jersey. At Seton Hall, where she joined the faculty in 1968, she established workshops on Judaism for church leaders and teachers, and led student groups on 54 tours of Israel.

In 2004, “Sister Rose's Passion,” a 39-minute documentary film on her life, won an award at the Tribeca Film Festival, and it was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. She also received more than 80 humanitarian awards, including the Anti-Defamation League's Cardinal Bea Interfaith Award in 2004, the first to go to a woman.

“The death of Sister Rose Thering is an immense loss for the entire Seton Hall family, indeed for all men and women who seek to forge a world of greater understanding,” said Monsignor Robert Sheeran, the president of Seton Hall. “For a half-century, she was an uncommon, inspired voice of reconciliation and dialogue among Christians and Jews.”

On a Wisconsin farm in childhood where Jews were spoken of in whispers, in her parochial-school catechisms and other religious texts that portrayed Jews as Christ-killers, Rose Thering learned the coded messages of intolerance early in life and found them unsettling. Later, as a teacher, she examined the Catholic textbooks of her students more critically and was shocked by what she found.

“I had ordered the most widely used Catholic religious teaching material from high school and grade school,” she recalled in 2004. “When I began to read, it almost made me ill.” She cited a passage that asked, “Why did the Jews commit the great sin of putting God himself to death?” and another declaring, “The worst deed of the Jewish people was the murder of the Messiah.”

Dr. Thering was in her 30s and had been teaching for years when she resolved to act against what she saw as a fundamental flaw in church teaching. The result was a study of anti-Semitism in Catholic texts and a dissertation for her 1961 doctorate at St. Louis University that propounded the evidence: textbooks and preachings that abounded in calumnies against Jews and Judaism. Her work was published later in an anthology, “Faith and Prejudice” (Paulist Press).

In 1962, when Pope John XXIII convened the ecumenical council known as Vatican II, Cardinal Augustin Bea used Dr. Thering's study to draft portions of the 1965 Vatican document “Nostra Aetate” (“In Our Age”), which reversed church policy and declared of Christ's death that “what happened in his passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” and, as for teaching, added, “The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.”

As Dr. Thering recalled later, “They were 15 lines in Latin, but they changed everything.”

In Catholic texts, in sermons and in other pronouncements of the church, a new attitude toward Jews was officially adopted, and while centuries-old wounds remained, dialogues between the church and Israel, and between Catholics and Jews, have been elevated to a more respectful plane over time.

Dr. Thering became an activist-teacher. She was hired at Seton Hall by Monsignor John Oesterreicher, an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis in 1938. He converted to Catholicism, became a priest and in 1953 founded the Institute of Judeo-Christian Studies at Seton Hall, a groundbreaking program that included priests, nuns and rabbis on the faculty and offered seminars for clergy, teachers and others.

In 1974, Dr. Thering presented a menorah to Pope Paul VI at the Vatican. In 1986, she went to Austria to protest the inauguration of President Kurt Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary-general, who had served in a Nazi army unit implicated in the deportation of Jews from Greece during World War II. In 1987, she went to the Soviet Union to protest the government's treatment of Russian Jews.

Rose Elizabeth Thering was born Aug. 9, 1920, in Plain, Wis., the sixth of 11 children in a German-American farm family that prayed together daily. She joined the Sisters of St. Dominic at 16 and earned a bachelor's from the Dominican College in Racine in 1953, a master's from the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul in 1957 and a doctorate at St. Louis University four years later.

In recognition of her interfaith work, the Rose Thering Endowment for Jewish-Christian Studies was established at Seton Hall in 1992. It has given scholarships to 350 teachers for graduate studies on the Holocaust and other subjects.